But it isn't gappy with common widely-distributed shelled marine animals; the problem is that no one cares about the record of those animals, they want the big sexy vertebrates. If you try to imagine where in the world today large vertebrates are dying under conditions that would fossilize them, you can see why finding their remains a few million years later is difficult.

They would have needed to be buried in clay or a similar sort of material almost immediately with no oxygen present. The only example I've heard about that is really good was in the Dinosaur mummy of the Hadrosaur in the Bad Lands.That fossil still had skin and muscle and possibly internal organs.

It depends on how you define "gappy." In studying human history, for example, we may not know exactly where a given person went or what he did on every single day of his life, but that doesn't mean we can't have a clear idea of what happened. The problem I find with the anti-evolution crowd is that they seem to expect us to know history to such an extent as to be able to tell exactly what time of day (down to the second) George Washington brushed his teeth!

Generally speaking, the more people talk about "being saved," the further away they actually are from true salvation.